This Month's Thoughts...August

  • Is there a more unappealing side than steamed baby carrots?  
  • If they come on a plate, I immediately revert to the question: do they not like me or do they suck at cooking?  And if they suck at cooking, why did they invite me over for dinner...
  • Humans have obviously affected the climate.  To deny this is, quite simply, dumb.  Before us, there wasn't even the conception for garbage or waste.  Animals do not make anything.  They do not cook anything.  They eat a local, organic diet that requires no packaging.  When they take a shit, it fertilizes the earth.  Things in the water build beautiful reefs.  
  • We are the ones that change things for the worse.  Order something in a day that comes in two cardboard boxes, two separate linings of plastic, with safety instructions, and warning labels that all need to be thrown into the trash.  This takes some type of transportation that required some type of fuel from mining the earth, leaving some type of waste that goes into the environment.  
  • Of course we impact environment.  
  • We don't even leave this simply to earth.  Since humans have started exploring space, we've left a layer of litter just outside the atmosphere, a layer of trash so big that it has to be taken into consideration when planning missions in the great beyond.  
  • The great beyond is pretty amazing.  
  • Is there anything better than when a toddler really likes you.  Like, if the toddler calls you 'her people', only classifying events and situations as complete if 'her people' are there: amazing.  
  • Teaching English, especially to people with thick accents, leads to some hilarious conversations, but also makes you see how important little letters in words can be.  Like, for instance, the 'f' in 'shift'.  To people that don't speak a language with hard sounds like that of our own native English, the 'f' isn't a sound that is produced very often.  So, when people are asking questions about work and vocabulary related to work, and this five letter word that signifies their daily hours, it's hilarious.  
  • Also hilarious is people in positions of power that try to be well meaning, but don't get it.  So they have the authority to make people do things, but the people doing them are like...what?
  • For example, I shared a room with a group this summer.  I was teaching a class in the morning, and this other group had the room in the afternoon.  I had adults, they had children.  They were trying to teach control using each of the fingers.  They assigned each finger something significant.  They claimed that the middle finger - the longest, and therefore the most authority - stood for power, and was to be used as a means for showing how powerful you were.  They wrote right in their rules to 'ignore' the social norms.  I just keep picturing a group of students flicking off the teacher, saying, "You're powerful!" and the teacher being caught in a conundrum, should she be encouraged or offended.  
  • Like the teacher I taught with that opened every class with prayer and promised to pray for all requests.  So the kids would raise their hands and say things like "Please help me to get a B on a test I didn't study for" or "Please help us to not have any homework tonight in any of our classes" or "Please help our teacher to give us all A's on our paper".  They could get this teacher on such a roll.  She'd either have to break her promise to them or publicly pray for something she didn't believe should happen.  
  • I think, instead of that type of thing, we should simply embrace the awkwardness.  Start saying, "This situation is really complex, but..." or "yeah, there's a lot of problems, but we can focus on the one we can control right now."